What Is a Hop-Free Beer? And Why Is It So Delicious?

In brewing’s contemporary landscape of attention-seeking India pale ales, it seems out of the four primary ingredients that constitute “beer”—malt, water, yeast, and hops—it's the hops, hops, and more hops that are getting the most attention. Like gin, which can be flavored by any number of different things but which must utilize juniper to be labeled as such, the inclusion of hops is a legal prerequisite to market beer in some countries, including the U.S.

But this wasn't always so. In fact, this hop requirement is vexing from a broader historical perspective, as beer dates back to the early Neolithic age, while hop usage in brewing is a significantly newer phenomenon, at roughly 1,000 years old.